If you inflate the currency, GDP goes up, and nominal debt stays the same. That’s the government’s current playbook, with its massive fiscal deficits.

This works if all the debt is long term debt (>=10Y), which surely Jellen and Bessent have been selling, right?

Have you considered that maybe lenders might be aware and are therefore not very willing to give long term debt to the USA?

The only thing missing is replacing the head of the federal reserve bank with a mindless puppet so they stop standing in the way of success (inflation).

That only works if rates don’t go up which is probably not a good premise to rely on

If you are in a balanced budget or continued deficit situation, then, yes, increased rates will eventually be a factor (but that's a lagging effect, even then) if you have a sufficient surplus that with the effect of inflation increasing its nominal size with the same real revenue and spending you can pay down debt at least as fast as it comes due, so you aren't going back to do new net borrowing, increase cost of borrowing doesn't matter much.

Come on, don't be uncharitable, language isn't inherently necessary for models like LLMs, you can train something similar on visual inputs. Fruit flies have neurons that pass around ~probabilities/signal strengths to each other to represent their environments and basic concepts, it's not way off as an analogy.

True if you look at the cost to build the plant, but it’s hard to colocate enough solar with heavy users, land near there is expensive, and transmission capacity is pretty hard to get built, so something very power dense with a small footprint is helpful. I haven’t dug into the numbers, so I could very well be wrong that it pencils out when you consider those.

And there are efforts to make building out transmission and interconnecting with the grid more streamlined, so maybe some of those problems will be gone by the time fusion’s ready.

Someone said recently that it’s nicer to have bad laws and good tech than a bad tech and good laws, solar+storage seems like it’s in the former now, and if we can clear the bureaucratic hurdles, we’ll see it boom here like we’ve seen elsewhere.

Good thing it only takes a couple dudes with impact drivers and a truck to tear that down in under a week. Even a hand truck is good enough to cart a few of them away at a time.

Yeah, I've seen this with our own solar installation - when the grid frequency dips even a bit, our house cuts itself off from the grid, including whatever power it was feeding back. It seems like a recipe for instability - grid is overstrained, so the frequency dips, and suddenly tons of distributed solar generation drops off and makes the grid even more strained.

And with UPSes that beep when they kick on, it's become very apparent that this happens basically daily during the summer, when power demand for air conditioning is high.

Costco sells a few varieties, this is the one we buy: https://www.costcobusinessdelivery.com/kokuho-rose-us-%231-e...

It's sushi rice, grown in CA, and it's very good. Same stuff we used to buy from our local Japanese grocery store in CA.

Context matters, who is leading that machinery? They seem to have the political will to invade.

Taiwan is a tricky case. The CCP isn't unjustified in making a claim to it. Granted: that claim is contrary to international norms, law, and the population's self determination.

But if China were only threatening to invade Taiwan it would be a gray area.

Imho, their claims in the South China Sea are much more obviously expansionist, given the settled cases against them under international law.

Much easier to see those boiling over into China invading a few populated islands of the Philippines.

Seriously. I think their fibery-looking bowls also tested near the top on PFAS by Consumer Reports.

Yeah, it's pretty eye opening to see how much more power our home's solar array puts out during the summer vs. the winter. It's like 3-4x, on average, while our power demand is actually highest in winter, due to the higher deltas between outdoor temps and reasonable indoor temps. As we shift more and more heating to electric heat pump, base load power capability is going to become more and more important.

And yeah, we need to decarbonize ASAP.

I thought that they were quite throttleable, and it was because they needed to run near full power to pencil out economically/amortize their huge capex - that their fuel costs are relatively insignificant by comparison. Is that not the case?

Yes, that's what I meant by "but they're horrendously inefficient and expensive to run that way."

Ah ok, sounded to me like there was some big ongoing inefficiency/inability, more than an opportunity cost thing.

Ya, fuel (uranium) is cheap, capital expenditures are not, so it makes sense to just run it at full bore all the time, even if you could bring it up and down quickly (which you really can’t).

Yes, they definitely can do load following.